Thursday, 7 October 2010

New harvest by the 23dt of October - Don't miss the experience of learning how to do an organic and ecological extra virgin olive oil!

You are all invited to enjoy the harvest with us. By the 23dt of October we will start the harvest and we will be happy to show you how we work and produce our winning extra vergin olive oil.

In the production of extra virgin olive oil, our target is to reach the ultimate quality. We are able to reach this result since we control all phases of the process from the manual harvesting in accordance with the old tradition to the pressing of the olives in our own technically advanced mill. We press the olives within 6 hours of their harvesting. This is the most important requirement to obtain the top quality and the highest nutritional benefits and flavor of the oil.

Plants from which we extract Fontanaro olive oil are grown on sunny slopes, far from factories and traffic congested roads, in an unpolluted natural environment.

Olive picking is carried out directly from the plant, hand made, and olives are machined within 6 hours after picking through the method of cold extraction.

That allows to preserve oil composition both from an organoleptic (colour, smell, taste) point of view and a chemical nutritional composition (acidity, number of peroxides, vitamin E, antioxidant substances).

The oil is not filtered, since we want to keep unaltered its nutritional features: therefore a dull look and the presence of a possible deposit are not faults, but rather, guarantee of quality. A light bitter and pungent taste is due to the presence of natural substances , mainly hydrophilic phenols (polifenoli) that are the most abundant natural antioxidant of virgin olive oil.

All productive procedures, from the care of the ground and plants up to the bottling, are strictly conformable to the standards of the organicl agriculture, so much so that we have achieved in 2001 ICEA certification of organicl oil.

At our farm we are totally committed to protect and respect the environment; we produce electricity with solarcells, we recoup the rain water for irrigation,and mainly use wood for heating.We recycle all the garbage and we don’t use any chemicals. We return the residues of the oil processing as natural fertilizer to the soil.

Fontanaro Olive Oil has received the award as " The Extra Virgin of Excitement" from the Slow Food Extra Virgin Guide, for its excellent Italian production in the category of extra virgin olive oil of organic agriculture.

BRIEFLYOlive oil has been constantly present as an indispensable element of nutrition and social survival in all Mediterranean cultures for four millennia, and probably longer. The archaeological evidence of prehistoric oil lamps shows that long before proper comestible oil had been perfected by about 2000 Before Our Era, the rude greasy muck extracted bypre-agricultural man served to satisfy his need of making light, of illuminating darkness, of keeping at bay the terrors of the night . . . and in fact, oils not of comestible quality were used for home illumination in many Mediterranean rural areas until well after World War Two. Besides their alimentary uses, good oils have always been vitally important as medicinals and cosmetics and as deeply-rooted symbols in religions and mythologies . . . Noah’s olive branch, sacred ritual anointings, Odysseus’ marriage, bed built out of the living trunk of an olive tree, a recently-founded Italian progressive political partyto name a few.By the time of Moses, around 1800 Before Our Era, olive cultivation - the Old Testament speaks often of it - had spread to all the then-known arable lands around the Mediterranean, an economy carried farr afield many centuries later by Roman expansion. Many different kinds of trees and fruits came out of this, partly by natural selection in different soils and climates, partly by empirical observation and grafting for

HISTORYThe oldest traces of plants that may be thought of as the ancestors of olive trees have been found in south-central France and dated to about fifty million years ago. Olive-tree fossils have turned up in the Sahara Desert. Prehistoric man doubtless ate the small, harsh desirable traits. In the course of the eighteen centuries between Caesar and Napoleon, nearly all of the then-populated Italian peninsula lying below certain temperature limits broke forth in olive trees that bore fruits of widely different characteristics. Today the oils from the lands around Lake Garda in the north are considered the lightest, those from Liguria the most fruity, the Tuscan ones the most balanced in extremely fine olivy flavour, robust consistency and durability, the Apulian ones the pepperiest, and so on through many zones and regions. The long-proven healthfulness of diets based on ample lashings of extra-virgin olive oil need hardly be reit-erated here . . . by now universally known, it attracts new and contented adherents every day., bitter olives he found on wild trees. After roughly 2000 Before Our Era, olive culture and the complicated science of oil extraction spread outward from the eastern Mediterranean basin into Anatolia, Egypt and Greece. Much later, by the first century Before Our Era, oil production had become so vital to Roman Italy that thousands of Greek slaves, trained and specialised in these arts, worked vast estates for domestic use in the endless empire and for export to the barbarian north. After the fall of Rome in the fifth century of Our Era, Italian production fell on hard times and eventually all but perished, but the Arabs in Spain not only carried on old traditions but developed new and better methods.Around the year One Thousand, in the times of the Italy of the City-States (Comuni), new impetus was given to this so very vital economy, at first especially in Tuscany around Florence and Siena but soon, by about 1300, all over the peninsula. Not only did good extra-virgin oil become an indispensable staple of diets but also an index of prosperity, even of wealth. Ever since about 1880, all of southern Italian agriculture has been pivoted on oil production in great quantities, with less attention to quality. For long now the extra-virgin oils of the Centre and North, especially of Liguria, Tuscany and Umbria, have led in quality by unbeatable margins, as is recognised by demanding gourmets the world over.

PRODUCTION METHODSUnlike wine, olive oil doesn’t improve with age . Within one year most of the good qualities of a pressing can be lost if the oil is not filtered immediately after the pressing (and we do it). For maximum conservation and general quality, only olives picked from the tree must be used, never windfalls or other gleaned from the ground because these have already begun to ferment. All the succeeding phases from storage to washing, crushing and pressing must be undertaken very quickly. Conscientious producers will limit storage of the picked crop to forty-eight hours and perform the separation of leaves from the fruit, the washing and the crushing within two days more.(Our process from picking to the final extra virgin olive oil is done within 12 hours).

A good extra virgin olive oil must be kept in a dark place at temperatures not above 18°C.